8 comments:

Attending a Reverdy-Clark match-up was an exciting and stimulating way to spend Sunday. Outside for a while, again playing the part of The Mower, I thought about these two poems and the way you internalized (it seemed to me) Reverdy’s way of looking and speaking (in writing) and applied it in the translation and Matins. I was lucky to discover Reverdy fairly early in my serious reading life and his voice and attitude sank in and grabbed hold. I’m not lucky enough to have a surpassing, instant understanding of things, so he’s often still a mystery to me, but one I like to return to because I think I derive something new and profound every time. All of the images – the drops, the marine organisms and Tom Raworth’s photograph – are wondrous accompaniments and remarkable on their own. The spider web is probably my favorite. Once I spent a long relaxing evening in pleasant wine-filled conversation on a summer porch watching two spiders spin webs in different corners. Seeing the web close-up like this, covered with morning dew, is unbelievable (but I trust the caption).

The folktale quality of this - particularly the idea of two fisherman, one hasty in the thrall of his quarry, the other patient, less ambitious - grounds it in the real, making the mystery so much more profound.

A pleasant blend that puts we in mind of Hesse and Chinese folklore. Lovely that mystery is the morale.

I see or, perhaps, rather feel the kinship you are talking about between the poems. In Brecht, it is the unstated which intrigues me. When the big fisherman lifts that stone triumphantly, you have to think that some one or two in the laughing crowd have, at least for a moment, stopped and begun to wonder. It would seem that wonder may be another form of mystery.

The three fisherman together would make what might be called, anachronistically, an old school mash-up. Thanks for pointing back to Brecht.